Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a payment card that provides multiple flexible payment or funding sources.
Brief Description of the Related Art
Today, consumers do not have flexible ways to control and change the funding source(s) associated with their payment card. As a result, they use different cards (debit, credit, store cards, etc.) for different types of purchases, purchase occasions and circumstances. Although, consumers do have some options with respect to interaction and choices regarding transaction channels, such as a Point of Sale (POS) terminal, Short Message Service (SMS), email, web interface and the systems pre-transaction, at the time of the transaction, and post transaction, there is no system that integrates all of these offerings into one convenient card.
In addition, there are some multi-account cards in the market today. These cards include more than one card account on the card itself, but each account must be either embossed on the card, encoded on the Magstripe and/or encoded on the CHIP at time of issuance. These cards require POS terminals, acceptance infrastructures and processes (including specific terminal to card communication protocols) that support such ‘multi-account’ cards. Multi-account card systems also do not provide consumers with ways to change or add additional funding sources.
Finally, although individual issuer processors may provide consumers with services that enable the consumer to choose between multiple funding sources, none of the issuer processors support multiple funding sources at the network level across separate banks or financial institutions. The current methods also fail to provide intelligent authorization routing in real-time against multiple funding sources and potentially separate systems or financial institutions based on cardholder choice.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a single payment card that provides the user with flexible payment options and the ability to choose multiple funding sources or between multiple funding sources without physically carrying multiple cards.